Republican Remedies

Abstract

Since its founding of the republic, Americans have devised a variety of different ways to reconcile unity with depth, separation with checks, and presidentialism with republicanism. This chapter surveys the succession of informal institutional and organizational improvisations that periodically altered practical working relationships within the American constitutional system. These extra-constitutional contrivances created several distinctive “systems” of administration, each of which preserved the republican idea of inter-branch collaboration. Nineteenth-century remedies were party-based; twentieth-century remedies were administration-based. The move from one system to the next marked a profound change in the operation of government at large, but at every turn, a more powerful presidency was corralled into novel arrangements that reaffirmed collective responsibility. The origins of our beleaguered republic lay in the 1970s, when that spirit of accommodation began to break down. Presidents grew more independent in their political and institutional powers, and they asserted their right to unitary control over the executive branch more vigorously. In the congressional pushback, collaboration gave way to a constitutional face-off.